FREETYPE 2 PROJECTS

FreeType 2 is used in an increasing number of projects. This page contains a small list of important projects using it.

Font Servers

The XFT Font Library

XFT is the name of the client-side library developed by Keith Packard to handle the new X11 extension named XRender. It is now part of X11.

XFT is also used by the Qt and GTK toolkits to display anti-aliased fonts.

Language Bindings

Caml

Bindings are part of the Development Kit.

D

Bindings have been submitted to Dsource.org.

Factor

This dynamic programming language comes with FreeType bindings. See here for more details.

Io

See here for more information on this prototype-based language.

Perl

More than a single binding package is available. Try here for a search on CPAN.

Python

Bindings are available from here and Python Imaging Library (PIL) can be built to use FreeType 2 for font rendering, giving high-level access to fonts.

Ruby

See http://www.pablotron.org/software/ft2-ruby.

Libraries

GD2

GD2 is the successor to the famous GD image-generation library. It uses FreeType 2 to generate text on images.

Pango

Pango is a text layout library developed for GTK+ that supports several font and rendering backends, one of them using FreeType 2. It also uses a heavily modified version of Freetype 1's OpenType layout code.

Other Projects

FontForge

FontForge is a free font editor which uses FreeType for rendering. It also uses FreeType's bytecode debugger (if compiled in) to single-step through instructed TrueType fonts.

The FreeType GIMP Plug-In

This is no longer available in the 2.6 series of The GIMP; it has apparently been replaced with advanced capabilities of the text manipulation palette.

For the 2.4 series on Windows, you might try this site to download the plug-in.

The ttfautohint library

This library takes a TrueType font and replaces its hints (if any) with new ones which look similar to FreeType's autohinter. It comes with a simple command-line demo program. You can download a preliminary version from Savannah or SourceForge.